it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red
blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the
dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And
at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
giving Offenbach. The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the
little town was placarded with announcements of _La Bella Elena_. The
peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot
night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its pauses. But
the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of
those three figures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of
the day.




POCKET VOCABULARIES


A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a
collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable
vocabulary. It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-
dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.
Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and
'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-
painting' (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn.
Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of
language. It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature
that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the
energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,